Maori Honey. Capturing the essence of a product in an online experience.


E-commerce
Custom CMS and catalog
User interface design
Photography

A boutique honey harvesting business in the north of New Zealand, Maori Honey specialise in selling high quality, limited quantity Manuka & native honey for export markets such as China and Japan.

The brief


3 core honey products- Night, Late Harvest and Ngahere (Native honey) with seasonal "vintages" under each.


Volume, seasonal quality and thus price fluctuations would need to be managed both with automation and customisation across vintages.


At premium price points, a strong visual design is needed to convey a brand position of exclusivity.

Design


Moody and minimal, capturing the mystical setting of the Manuka bushland in New Zealand's far north.

Identifying the stand-out USP of Maori Honey's offering- the night vs day harvested honey, we designed a user experience to match. The website identifies the time of day of the visitor's device and serves up a night or day theme to match.

In a more tactical design sense, the physical jar is the site-wide centrepiece object around which the muted environmental imagery is wrapped.

Development


A lean, simple content management system, responsive hand coded front-end and a custom e-commerce database structure.

After a single discovery meeting with the client we quickly established a site architecture which allowed each core product to exist as an individual identity and "micro-site" within the store.

This enabled not only targeted, direct linking from external marketing but also provides a mechanism for grouping the seasonal vintages of each variety in a logical format.

Adding a quantity unit stock for each vintage then enabled automatic "sold out" messaging - not only protecting the client from out of stock orders but also reinforcing the products' scarcity.

Project specs

Live date: 2016. Status: Active

Tech Stack

  • Microsoft Azure Hosting / SSL
  • MS SQL Server and Database
  • Microsoft .NET (MVC)
  • Sendgrid system emails (order notifications)
  • Google Analytics
  • Html5 / CSS3 / JQuery & Plugins (Frontend)
  • Custom Javascript

Delivered

  • Responsive UI, mobile and time based theming
  • Merchant integration (eWay)
  • E-Commerce suite: Discount module, Freight Matrix and Order dashboard.
  • Custom product/stock handling database
  • Content editing, image management (CMS)
  • Design concepts, copywriting & photography

Interested in starting a project like this?

Yes, hook me up.

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